Inside the Glaze Room

The glaze room smells of iron and ash. It is early, and Sofia has already been at the bench for an hour, weighing oxides on a scale older than she is. “The recipe is the easy part,” she says. “The fire is the author.”

Reactive glazes are, by design, unpredictable. They break and pool in the kiln, running darker where the glaze is thick and lighter where it thins over an edge. Two vases dipped from the same bucket can emerge looking like cousins rather than twins.

For a factory, this is a defect. For Sofia, it is the point. “People think handmade means imperfect,” she says. “It means honest. You can see exactly what happened.”

By mid-morning the kiln is loaded and sealed. It will not open for two days. What comes out, none of us can fully predict — and that, she reminds us, is why it is worth waiting for.